What is the nature of the Jewish question, how has it been adapted and what does its continued presence tell us? David Seymour will explore.
Eschewing conventional accounts of the present increase in anti-Jewish attitudes and actions as a ‘return of antisemitism’, this presentation places the contemporary moment within the broader horizon of an ongoing and unresolved Jewish question. The paper begins with a discussion of the essence of the Jewish question. Beginning as a reaction to the calls for Jewish emancipation at the turn of the 19 th century The Jewish question turns on the notion of an inherent, particularistic, hostile ‘Jewish element’ that poses an obstacle and threat to universal emancipation. This paper then goes on to discuss the various iterations in which the Jewish question has appeared since that time, including religious (anti-Judaism), nationalist, (Jews as an alien and hostile nation within modern national), racial (antisemitism) and, since the turn of the 21 st century, antizionist (Israel as an irredeemable obstacle and threat to the global world order). I then go on to note the irony that this latest iteration includes, if not centres, on the very elements believed by both perpetrators and opponents of antisemitism to have marked the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ in the mid-to late 1940’s; acknowledgement of the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel. It concludes by noting that as the ongoing and contemporary presence of the Jewish question indicates, the social and political completion of Jewish emancipation remains a work in progress.
David Seymour is Senior Lecturer in Law at City Law School, City St. Georges, University of London. He has written extensively on the topics of Critical Theory, Holocaust Memory, Antisemitism and Antizionism.
